The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (19 page)

Holland, Bateman, and real-life postman Freddie Gorman, all of whom earned royalties. At the session, when Benny Benjamin didn’t show, Marvin Gaye played drums, laying down a spontaneous shuffle backbeat. And with Gladys Horton’s lead vocal beseeching a mailman to

“deliver the letter the sooner the better” and its catchy “Wait a minute, wait a minute” hook, it would catch the early wave of homesick blues as the Vietnam War escalated and girls pined for just such missives.

The Supremes—or, rather, one of them—earned an assist, too.

Upon meeting the Marvelettes, as Gordy had renamed the Casingyettes, moments before they went in for their vocals, Ballard and Wilson sized up the new girls, not entirely favorably. “We were jealous of [them] encroaching on our territory,” Wilson would recall. But an altruistic Flo, upon hearing their first takes, couldn’t help but offer a few suggestions when the Marvelettes took five.

“Understand,” says the Marvelettes’ Katherine Anderson, “we’d never even been in a studio before. We’d only sang in choirs or glee clubs. It was our own song and we didn’t know how to sing it.” Lead singer Gladys Horton adds: “Florence came over and said she had a few ideas that would make the song sound more loose and homey. We were all tight—petrified—and Florence was a sweetheart, and what she said was dead on.”

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That included having Horton draw out the word “postman” and having the group pepper the background with “oh yeahs.” All these elements built Gordy his dream vehicle, not just any Cadillac but a fully operational crossover chart-topper. Released exactly a month after the abortive “Buttered Popcorn,” fourteen weeks later it was sitting in the top slots of both the pop and R&B charts, clearing over a million records, at least according to Gordy.

In the wake of “Mr. Postman,” distributors who had to be persuaded to take Motown product in the slump period following “Shop Around” now begged for it. In turn, Gordy had Ales drive a hard bargain: Distributors would get no Motown hot wax unless they paid every cent held back in the past for “expenses”—a most ironic and duplicitous demand, given how Gordy stiffed his own talent using the same dodge and promised to pay every cent that would be earned by future records.

And meanwhile, back on the Supremes front, there was mostly empty space. Not only had they been overtaken by the Marvelettes but they weren’t even running second among the girls overall. In fact, Mary Wells had been the first individual singer to break out, when the song she’d penned, “Bye Bye Baby,” hit No. 8 R&B and No. 45 pop late in 1960, followed in 1961 by “I Don’t Want to Take a Chance,” which hit No. 9 R&B and No. 33 pop. Smokey Robinson then wrote and produced “The One Who Really Loves You” for her, and it exploded to Nos. 2 and 8 (the first Top Ten pop song on the Motown label), kicking off a string of bright, bouncy collaborations between the two, with Wells’s fey, feline voice a near-copy of Smokey’s and the songs mirrors of his dreamy pop confections with the Miracles.

The Supremes did well by merely staying in the game, when the alternative might have meant withering apathy from Gordy. For this, they had Ross’s gall to thank. At 17 and still working toward her high school graduation in January 1962, she had nonetheless won a reputation as an intolerable harpy among the women folk of Motown. Feign-ing friendliness for the sake of “family” comity while passing catty remarks about the female competition, she was especially competitive when the Marvelettes shot to the top of the charts. While the rest of the company, including Wilson and Ballard, delighted in their sudden success, Ross turned up her nose in disdain.

“Diane was so jealous, you could smell the jealousy,” says Marvelette Katherine Anderson. “Florence and Mary were happy for us, so it wasn’t like it was them against us. When we first met them, Florence took to us right away. And Mary was, well, Mary; she was always very nice. But Diane was standoffish. She felt we were a threat. And they 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 94

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were nobodies like us, but Diane felt like they were the first girl-group at Motown so they deserved to have the first hit. To her, the Marvelettes were like dirt, little ninnies from Inkster, and she was Miss Sophistication—and she was from the projects!”

“The thing I remember about her was what we called ‘the look,’ the

‘Diane look.’ She used to have this look on her face, like a scowl. Even when she was acting all buddy-buddy, she’d be scowling at you. Our attitude was, we don’t really care whatever your problem was. We’d just laugh at her and walk away saying, ‘Is she for real?’” Ross’s attitude would worsen. In the spring of 1962, when the Marvelettes were to go out on tour to promote their first album, one of the girls, Wanda Young, had to miss the tour because she was about to have a baby. Because their contract with promoters required that there be a full contingent of five Marvelettes on stage, the group proposed that the Supreme who had been so helpful to them be Young’s stand-in. Flo Ballard agreed, and Gordy signed off on it.

As Ballard saw it, doing so was perfectly in keeping with the communal, all-for-one, one-for-all spirit of Motown, and of mutual benefit to both groups. “She went with us to help us out but also to experience life on the road on a big tour,” said the Marvelettes’ lead singer, Gladys Horton. But to Diane and, to a lesser degree, Mary, she was less D’Artag-nan than Mata Hari. Ross kept the Motown crowd entertained for days with melodramatic diatribes when Flo came to Motown not for Supremes business but to rehearse with the Marvelettes.

“If she wants to be a Marvelette,” she would say, “then she should be a goddamn Marvelette for all I care.”

Mary, not given to such garish scenes, quietly brooded that Ballard was “our sister, not theirs,” but, as always, she capitulated to decisions beyond her control after Flo explained that she had no disloyalty and no agenda. In fact, she had a hidden agenda, but that had nothing to do with group matters: She was sweet at the time on the Marvelettes’ road manager Joe Schaffner, who was spending a lot of time with Katherine Anderson; Flo didn’t mind a bit that she’d be making time for herself with Schaffner. In fact, when Esther Gordy Edwards, who would accompany them on the tour as a chaperone at her brother’s request, forewarned the four actual Marvelettes that there’d be no time for fraternizing and they’d have to stay in their rooms and do their high school homework, Flo figured that being a dropout had a definite upside.

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asked to sing on a major tour. Indeed, the loyalty issue would not be one Diane Ross reminded anyone else of down the road.

The Marvelettes-plus-one-Supreme tour, with stops in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York, went without a hitch, ending with the mandatory, and exhilarating, appearance at the Apollo Theater, where they shared the bill with the likes of Jerry Butler, the pre-Motown Gladys Knight and the Pips, Barbara George, and comedian George Kirby. Flo came out dressed like the other Marvelettes in a knee-length skirt and matching headband and twisted, jerked, and mashed-potatoed through the set as best she could.

“Flo did what we asked and Lord, that girl could sing. But it was obvious she wasn’t that good a dancer. She had problems with the routines,” Anderson says. “That was the difference between them and us.

The Marvelettes were very high-energy and we were known for our dancing. The Supremes never really were dancers. They didn’t have any moves, they just sort of stood there and swayed back and forth. They couldn’t hold a candle to us.”

A wry grin. “But they had something we didn’t—they had, or Diane did, a hold on Berry. Even before they had a hit, they had Berry.” For Flo, the tour provided companionship she never found within her own group (though apparently not quite enough with Joe Schaffner, who would ultimately marry Katherine Anderson). Her kinship with Gladys Horton deepened; the two of them roomed together and sat beside each other for long hours on the bus rides, engaged in what for Ballard was highly personal conversation. When Gladys opened up about her rough childhood in a foster home, Flo was led to recount the rape. Recognizing how painful it was for her, Horton would keep the secret, not telling the other Marvelettes.

Horton is still proprietary about Ballard’s revelations. “She told me about it, but I didn’t learn a lot about her. Maybe because I was so young and I didn’t realize the full extent of it, psychologically, when a girl becomes a woman. When you’re young, things don’t touch you as bad.” But Horton did reflexively steer the conversation to other areas, such as when Flo abruptly switched her infatuation from Schaffner to a co-performer on the tour, the Pips’ William Guest. “She’d ask, ‘Gladys, was he looking at me?’ Flo always had an eye for the sharpest guys.” Those sorts of schoolgirl crushes could temporarily divert Ballard from the scars of the rape, but Horton’s silence aside, word of it still festered around Hitsville. Says Katherine Anderson: “The rumors got around. You know, there’d be whispers. It wasn’t from Gladys, so I don’t 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 96

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know where it came from. But there were very few secrets at Motown that all of us didn’t know about sooner or later; that’s how tight the community was. Maybe it was because it struck everybody that Florence was troubled. She was usually very, very quiet. Oh, she could have fun, get silly, and we had a lot of fun on that tour and on the Motown tours after that. But you could see that was a front. I could see something bothered her. Sometimes she’d get very emotional. There were things tearing her up inside.”

Hard as it was to read Florence Ballard, though, “[i]t was easier to see one thing she felt: How much she disliked Diane. She wouldn’t even try to defend her. When Diane went off on one of her crazy rants, she’d just roll her eyes, like, ‘Uh-oh, here she goes again.’” It wasn’t group loyalty, then, that kept the Supremes in the mix. It was that the menfolk of Motown melted into puddles before Diane Ross.

What’s more, as if in a chemical recoil to Fred Ross’s stifling moral codes, she was crossing sexual boundaries where she’d previously stopped short. All the Supremes were—most obviously so in the case of Barbara Martin, who in late 1961 got married and by early ’62 was pregnant, portending the dilemma of how to fill a pregnancy leave by one of their own. Their virginity now a thing of the past, Ross, Wilson and Ballard could be found making the scene, usually independently, and pairing off with a revolving ring of men they barely knew. Recalling that haze of backroom parties and raging hormones, Wilson once coyly told of hooking up with a guy she could remember only by the white Dodge he drove, calling it a “lovemobile.”

At one such party, attended by Mary and Diane, a punk called Silky began coming on too strong with Ross on the dance floor, clamp-ing her against his body so tightly she couldn’t pry herself away. Apparently this had been planned in advance to unnerve the haughty

“princess” Diane. Mary, in on the gag, giggled as she watched Diane become more and more unsettled, until she wailed for help in cold fear.

Only then did Mary play her part and intervene to “save” her.

That a staged act so inconsiderate in light of Flo’s rape could be amusing to Mary was stunningly cruel. But it underscored the tenuous, razor’s edge alliance of the three core Supremes, explaining why Ballard was already closer to a girl in a rival group than to anyone in hers. It 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 97

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might also explain why Ross could return the cruelty to Wilson in more subtle ways, such as constantly criticizing the prettier Mary for her tastes in clothing and makeup, as well as for her “skinny legs,” an odd thing to say for a girl whose legs were no less skinny. When Mary, too, became engaged late in 1961, impetuously, to a childhood chum named Ronnie Hammers, Diane started sidling up to the young man in what Mary took to be flirting. When Wilson and Hammers decided to call off the engagement and broke up, Ross suddenly lost interest in him.

Around Motown the Supremes, who could sound blissfully cohesive in the studio, made people shake their heads about how divergent they were on a personal level. The Marvelettes were not the only ones who noticed how little Flo and Mary defended Diane when she created a spat between herself and other girls. Indeed, it seemed more than just for a hoot that Mary bided her time before coming to Diane’s aid at that party; it was a message that she might not be as obedient as Diane assumed. That, in turn, likely made Ross even more apt to act in her own interests, and to get her own way.

Wilson, years later, echoed Gordy’s descriptives of the individual Supremes.

They were, she wrote, “three completely different, insecure people,” each gleaning from the other two character traits that she lacked—to wit, Flo’s “earthiness, my nice guy demeanor, and Diane’s aggressive charm,” brightly concluding that “we accidentally discovered that these three separate, incomplete young girls combined to create one great woman.”

While that was intended in the figurative sense, the postulation turned out to be all too true in the literal sense: Out of the mix of the three Supremes, there would be created only one great woman. The one for whom being great was an obsession.

Given her predatory impulses, daring, and thirst to slay a good challenge, it was natural that Ross would quickly have in her crosshairs a conquest that could help keep the Supremes—and Diane herself—

lurching forward. In the long run, that target would of course be one Berry Gordy, but at 17 she knew well that the vast difference in their ages and experience made it all moot. Berry operated on a level far beyond hers. But if the same seemed to be the case with Gordy’s top 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 98